Altoids Tin Divider and Tweezers

One of my most popular projects has been the etched Altoids tins that I made for the Steampunk Bible article I wrote. For years I've carried one in my bag that I've used for various medications and vitamin pills when traveling. I had cut up one of those typical SMTWTFS pill boxes to make the dividers and while it worked well enough it was a royal pain to get the pills out with my no-so-slender fingers.

I took to carrying tweezers in my bag to for this very purpose. Of course the TSA is of the opinion that 00 Non-Magnet Stainless Steel Tweezers are a threat to the flying public. :-/

Then a friend suggested that I print dividers for the tins on my RepRap 3D printer. Brilliant! and I can incorporate a pair of tweezers right into the design!

I am still searching for the right tool for designing things to be printed. Autodesk's 123D is currently the one I use most but it is less than complete and crashes a lot (though not nearly as much as it used too!) But it was up to this fairly simple task.

I worked up a design for the dividers and tweezers and then used the tweezers as a "tool" to cut a place for them to rest in the top of the dividers.

If you'd like to make your own tweezers and dividers the files are linked above as well as on Thingiverse.

I printed them in clear ABS, which is currently my favorite material. It sticks well to the glass build plate and has pretty good internal adhesion. I am currently building a heated enclosure for my printer build area and I'm hoping this will further improve the print quality.

The first iteration was too small, I am still calibrating my designs for shrinkage. However 123D makes scaling the part up by a couple of percent relatively trivial and the current design fits into the typical Altoids tin quite tightly.